I actually chose to focus on Tompkins' chapter 4 in which she talks about "Cracking The Alphabetic Code". Mrs. Firpo uses a Basal reading throughout this chapter--I think that this is important to note that a lot of times in our education here at MSU we have been taught that a lot of the "traditional" teaching tools are not effective and that we need to be new and innovative in our own right to provide things in our classroom for our students from a different angle. I think this chapter is a perfect example of how to use something to our advantage although we may not originally think it is innovative enough. Not only does she just use the Basal readers for her students to build phonics, she has a focus wall that incorporates the things they are getting in the books. She makes up little packets [p 112] to have the students use at school and then take home to extend their learning beyond the classroom. "Each week the students receive three take home boks that MRs. Firpo has duplicated, folded, and stabled together; the purpose of these books is to reinforce the phonics focus of the week...The students keep the book at their desks to use for a seatwork activity...they take them home each day. Alraedy they have collected more than 75 books!" [p 111-112]
I think the way that Mrs. Firpo is allowing her students to have this collection of books is enhancing their learning so much, particularly for those students whose parents aren't able to buy books and keep them at home. This is something we will definitely need to pay attention to as teachers at this time in our Nation's history.
Moving on to the phonics in the chapter, I wanted to note something that I see in my placement almost all day every single time I visit. On page 122, Tompkins talks about segmentation. "One of the more difficult phonemic awareness activities is segmentation, in which children isolate the sounds in a spoken word (Yopp, 1988)". Our CT has a list of words with three phonemes in them [for now], and she uses that list to do what she calls karate chopping with the students. She has them use their hands to mark each phoneme of the word. For example “fun” would be ‘chopped’ into /f/ /u/ /n/ Using their hands to karate chop the air in the order of the phonemes. Another way she does this is to give each child three chips. They sit on the floor with the chips in a row in front of them. For each phoneme [she calls them sounds] the students are to push a chip forward. This is a new technique that they’re learning and it is slightly more difficult than the karate chopping that the students are used to. By asking all of the students to participate in sessions like this, it helps them to incorporate these “manipulatives” in hearing and feeling the phonemes in different ways, showing that the words can be broken up into sounds.
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You make a great point about the Tompkins chapter and innovative teaching techniques. I agree completely with you, just because a teaching technique is old does not mean that it is doesn't work. Likewise, just because a teaching technique is "innovative" doesn't mean that it is guaranteed to work. I think that as teachers we need to be willing to use old and new techniques in our teaching. The key is to find what works best for your specific class and for each individual student within that class.
ReplyDeleteIn my class the kids love the karate chopping of words into individual sounds and this seems to work well for them. They all get very excited when doing this and I have even seen some of them doing it at their seats while doing worksheets. However, if this isn't working for some students I am sure that my CT will find a method, old or new, that will be more effective.